Nvidia “CPUs”
A couple of days ago I mentioned the fact that Nvidia is planning to annihilate the CPU market. It’s not clear why they intend to do this, but it looks like the Santa Clara company got Intel and AMD figured out and the green guys scheme a nasty takeover in small steps. Why small steps? Because their first targets are handhelds and notebooks.
Tegra APX 2500 is an ARM11 based system-on-a-chip. Presumably, Nvidia wants to obliterate Intel’s Atom with this one. The system-on-a-chip measures 144mm, and can easily manage 720p encoding/decoding tasks at 14MBps, thanks to a 500+ MHz clock. Although it supports most of the current-gen features in GeForce GPUs, the Tegra APX 2500 will actually perform like a shrunk-down GeForce 6600. Still, the GPU part will be able to deal with AA and AF settings and will support the latest OpenGL ES 2.0.
CSX 600 and 650 are a bit more complex. However, as these aren’t x86-based chips, they can only run Windows CE, so if you plan to play around with XP-only programs and games, you might have to wait for the next-gen. The chip itself has 256K of L2 cache and can be die stacked to keep the footprint small. The CSX chips run at 700-800MHz and are said to support 1080p at 24FPS. Atom can do all these plus it doesn’t have the FPS limit. Now I wonder if Nvidia has some other aces in its sleeve, because with these two chips Nvidia has pretty much nothing on Intel.
Nvidia is supposed to showcase these two at Computex this year and maybe we’ll hear some info on price and availability in the weeks to come.
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